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Is Frontier Communications Corporation (FTR) A Good Stock To Buy ?

The 700+ hedge funds and famous money managers tracked by Insider Monkey have already compiled and submitted their 13F filings for the first quarter, which unveil their equity positions as of March 31. We went through these filings, fixed typos and other more significant errors and identified the changes in hedge fund portfolios. Our extensive review of these public filings is finally over, so this article is set to reveal the smart money sentiment towards Frontier Communications Corporation (NASDAQ:FTR).

Hedge funds' reputation as shrewd investors has been tarnished in the last decade as their hedged returns couldn't keep up with the unhedged returns of the market indices. Our research has shown that hedge funds' large-cap stock picks indeed failed to beat the market between 1999 and 2016. However, we were able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that outperformed the market by 40 percentage points since May 2014 through May 30, 2019 (see the details here). We were also able to identify in advance a select group of hedge fund holdings that'll significantly underperform the market. We have been tracking and sharing the list of these stocks since February 2017 and they lost 30.9% through May 30, 2019. That's why we believe hedge fund sentiment is an extremely useful indicator that investors should pay attention to.

How have hedgies been trading Frontier Communications Corporation (NASDAQ:FTR)?

At the end of the first quarter, a total of 18 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey were long this stock, a change of 20% from one quarter earlier. On the other hand, there were a total of 19 hedge funds with a bullish position in FTR a year ago. So, let's find out which hedge funds were among the top holders of the stock and which hedge funds were making big moves.

FTR_jun2019

According to publicly available hedge fund and institutional investor holdings data compiled by Insider Monkey, Jim Simons's Renaissance Technologies has the biggest position in Frontier Communications Corporation (NASDAQ:FTR), worth close to $9.6 million, accounting for less than 0.1%% of its total 13F portfolio. The second most bullish fund manager is Michael Hintze of CQS Cayman LP, with a $2.9 million position; 0.1% of its 13F portfolio is allocated to the company. Remaining peers with similar optimism encompass Philippe Laffont's Coatue Management, D. E. Shaw's D E Shaw and Israel Englander's Millennium Management.

Consequently, specific money managers were breaking ground themselves. Coatue Management, managed by Philippe Laffont, initiated the biggest position in Frontier Communications Corporation (NASDAQ:FTR). Coatue Management had $1.7 million invested in the company at the end of the quarter. Joel Greenblatt's Gotham Asset Management also initiated a $0.3 million position during the quarter. The other funds with brand new FTR positions are Jon Bauer's Contrarian Capital, Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell's Arrowstreet Capital, and Michael Platt and William Reeves's BlueCrest Capital Mgmt..

As you can see these stocks had an average of 8.75 hedge funds with bullish positions and the average amount invested in these stocks was $32 million. That figure was $20 million in FTR's case. Avedro, Inc. (NASDAQ:AVDR) is the most popular stock in this table. On the other hand Spark Networks SE (NYSEAMEX:LOV) is the least popular one with only 2 bullish hedge fund positions. Compared to these stocks Frontier Communications Corporation (NASDAQ:FTR) is more popular among hedge funds. Our calculations showed that top 20 most popular stocks among hedge funds returned 6.2% in Q2 through June 19th and outperformed the S&P 500 ETF (SPY) by nearly 3 percentage points. Unfortunately FTR wasn't nearly as popular as these 20 stocks and hedge funds that were betting on FTR were disappointed as the stock returned -39.2% during the same period and underperformed the market. If you are interested in investing in large cap stocks with huge upside potential, you should check out the top 20 most popular stocks among hedge funds as 13 of these stocks already outperformed the market in Q2.

Disclosure: None. This article was originally published at Insider Monkey.